Building an all-star team for your business takes a tremendous amount of work. Sometimes, even when you get all the right people in the right roles, things don’t feel quite right. Even the perfect team on paper can benefit from refining how they collaborate.
That’s where Health First Network found an opportunity. With a team of super smart, experienced employees, they knew they were well-positioned for success. However, they recognized that by strengthening communication and refining team dynamics, they could enhance their collaboration and elevate the service they delivered to customers.
To support their goals, Health First Network partnered with Castle HR as a fractional HR partner. Together, we navigated a period of transition, offering mediation and strategic support to optimize team cohesion.
This is the story of how Health First Network used Castle HR’s strategic expertise to boost employee engagement and customer satisfaction, leading to a 50% increase in their employee net promoter score (eNPS).
You Need to Know What’s Really Causing Employee Tensions
Moral and team dynamics are key to company culture. For small businesses, even small misalignments can have an outsized impact. This was the case for Health First Network: “They are a small team, so they have to all get along in order to function,” explains Lindsay Schultz, Senior HR Business Partner at Castle HR.
When we started working with Health First Network, the CEO, Davide Viola, recognized there were opportunities to strengthen collaboration within his team, but lacked the internal HR expertise needed to bring those improvements to life. To further complicate matters, Health First Network was entering a transition period as a senior leader was retiring.
With decades of experience in the HR trenches helping over two hundred companies, our team knows how to manage these delicate issues and help teams mesh. We gave Health First Network CEO Davide Viola an invaluable external perspective to help him create the best new structure for his team.
Mediation played an important role, too. Employees were given a dedicated space to share their perspectives and develop a better understanding of one another. These conversations laid the groundwork for improved communication and collaboration.
Now, they have a new team structure that makes sense based on the company’s needs and team members’ expertise. Additionally, our mediation has helped the business develop processes and communication styles that help teams to work better together and resolve any tension that might arise.
Find the Shared Values that Make Your Team Tick
Shared values give your team common ground on which to build a solid working relationship. However, they need to be more than just an inspirational poster on the wall — your company will only see the benefit of those values if the whole team brings them to life in their work. Here’s how we helped Health First Network define and live its company values.
Workshop Your Values to Understand What’s Most Important
Your leadership team shouldn’t dictate company values — they should be defined and co-created by the wider organization. This ensures they’re a genuine reflection of what matters most to your employees and the business, making it more likely your team will feel connected to those values. “A value should be something relatable to the employee, a way of doing something right, a behavior,” explains Lindsay.
We’ve worked with dozens of companies and developed our own approach to helping businesses uncover their company values. At Health First Network, we began with a presentation to help the team understand what makes a good value — it should cover all elements of your business, from the work you do for clients to your internal systems and processes.
Then, we discussed what matters most to the business. “We ask questions like why are you most proud to work at this company, and what do you love most about your favorite co-worker. It’s a fun exercise,” says Lindsay.
We use the answers to create a word cloud that highlights the business’s most important aspects. “Just from the words that are coming up, I can tell what kind of company it is,” Lindsay adds.
Health First Network word cloud from its values workshop with Castle HR
In a separate meeting, we pick out the most prominent words from the word cloud. These become the starting point of the company values. Today, Health First Network has a set of seven core company values and behaviors that were defined and created by its employees:
- Community: We are a community of HFN Members, staff, vendors, and partners who support each other to serve the vision of establishing our Members as the first choice in serving consumers in their communities for their natural holistic healthcare needs. We want everyone to feel like they are part of a large family.
- Objective Empathy: Recognizing that while we are at work, we work as a team, and each of us is valued and needed. To maintain holistic harmony, we choose responsibility over blame, curiosity over judgment, clarity over confrontation and handle all situations with compassion. Praise in public, critique and feedback in private.
- Integrity: We are reliable and act with honesty and respect for everyone in our community. Our collective efforts are always focused on strengthening the HFN ecosystem.
- Stakeholder Commitment: We demonstrate initiative and collaborate to succeed. Founded on the principle of ‘Better, Together’, we work side by side with passion and are uplifted to heights that we could not accomplish on our own.
- Dedication: We are dedicated and disciplined in our work ethic, with a commitment to results. As a small and mighty team with many stakeholders, we act with intent and a sense of urgency. Know your audience, make every interaction positive and minute count.
- Health: We are passionate about natural health, live what we do and encourage a work-life balance to nurture a healthy mind and body while respecting our environment.
- Innovation: We strive to be innovators for our Members, Vendors and Communities. We inspire one another and are open to the most impossible of ideas, knowing that these ideas will lead to the ultimate in innovation for the natural health industry in Canada.
Hold Everyone Accountable for Bringing Your Values to Life
Defining your company values is just the first step towards strengthening company culture and improving employee satisfaction. To improve team morale, your employees must commit to those values and bring them to life through their everyday work.
“Values touch every aspect of the business. For example in HR, they touch the policies that you’re going to create for your team,” explains Lindsay. “At Health First Network, the CEO has their values laminated and he brings them with him to every meeting — that’s how important they are.”
Along with encouraging employees to consider the company values in every meeting, we tie them to people’s success at the business. “When we’re building up to performance reviews, we make the values a part of that. So employees are scored on how well they uphold the values in their reviews,” says Lindsay.
Health First Network’s values and behaviors have become part of the fabric, giving the team a shared purpose. This helps them work together more effectively, confident they share the same goals and priorities.
Track Employee Satisfaction to Spot Problems on the Horizon
Any changes in your organization will affect employee happiness and company culture. Tracking metrics like eNPS lets you measure employee sentiment over time. When it drops (or rises), investigate what’s changed to better understand what’s affecting team satisfaction and the cultural health of your business.
Health First Network runs employee engagement surveys every six months. When they first started working with Castle HR, we made many changes to their processes and ways of working — the team had to adapt. Now, they’re reaping the benefits of their hard work, and employee satisfaction has increased dramatically. After five years of working with us, they’ve had a 50% increase in eNPS.
Strategic HR Support Is A True Business Asset
In any company, personal dynamics and workplace tensions can occasionally hinder employees from delivering their best work. The impact can feel even greater in small businesses.
Health First Network’s story demonstrates how strategic HR support from a fractional team with years of experience (including proven playbooks, mediation experience, and an embedded approach) can directly improve employee satisfaction and business outcomes. If you’re interested in seeing how the right HR strategy can transform your company culture, we’re here to help. Book a call with an HR expert.
